Post-punk revival
Sung. Melodic singing throughout.
In short
The same basslines and the same chill, revived every ten years with contemporary production.
How it sounds
- Melodic basslines up front with sharp, dry guitars.
- Dry drums, often with tribal toms and closed hi-hats.
- Cold production with large-room reverb on the vocals.
Hear what that means
- Two guitars doing one bass's job
Interpol - Turn On the Bright Lights
Angular interlocking single-note lines with the bass carrying the tune - Joy Division's arrangement reproduced with an extra guitar.
Open on YouTube - Where the politics came back
The revival's second phase put actual content back into the technique, which the stylish 2002 wave had left out.
Open on YouTube - Shouted rather than deadpan
IDLES - Joy as an Act of Resistance
Post-punk's rhythm section under a vocal that refuses detachment entirely.
Open on YouTube
Loaded only when you press play — nothing reaches Google before that. Each opens at the start of the recording.
The specifics
- Tempo
- 120-160 bpm
- Song length
- 3-5 min
- Tuning
- Standard, with clean or lightly overdriven guitars played high on the neck in single notes — post-punk's technique reproduced deliberately.
- Production
- Dry, close and deliberately unglamorous, with the bass forward and the drums unprocessed. The later wave is louder and less austere than the 2002 records.
- Written about
- Alienation, The city, Politics, on the later bands, Detachment as a posture
What each part is doing
- Guitar Angular single-note lines and arpeggios with delay, avoiding power chords entirely. Interpol's two guitars interlock in the manner of Joy Division's one plus bass.
- Bass The melodic lead, played high and mixed forward — the single clearest inheritance from the genre being revived.
- Drums Metronomic and tom-heavy, often with the toms mixed as prominently as the snare, reproducing Martin Hannett's approach without his equipment.
- Vocals Baritone and deadpan on the first wave of the revival; on the later Irish and English bands, shouted and explicitly political.
What it isn't
That it ended in 2005. The genre's second phase is stronger than its first: the Irish and English bands of the late 2010s took post-punk's techniques and put actual political content back into them, which the 2002 revival — stylish, detached and largely apolitical — had left out. Filing all of it as a 2000s fashion misses where the idea actually went.
Told apart from
- Post-punk The revival reproduces post-punk's techniques with modern recording. The originals were inventing; these bands are choosing.
- Garage rock revival The two revivals ran simultaneously and get confused. This one looks to 1979, the other to 1965 — the tell is whether the bass has the tune.
- Gothic rock Interpol were frequently called goth by people hearing the baritone and the reverb. The music has no drum machine and no theatricality.
- Indie rock The revival was indie's commercially successful wing in the 2000s, and shares its labels entirely.
The genres this one is most often mistaken for. Written, not derived.
History
Between 2001 and 2004, Interpol, Editors and dozens of others revived the Joy Division sound with contemporary technology. The wave returned in the 2010s through British and Irish bands — Fontaines D.C., IDLES, Shame — this time with a political edge and speaking instead of singing. The genre seems to reappear every ten years without fail.
Descended from
Siblings on this branch
Sounds like this, elsewhere in the tree
- Lo-fi / slacker rock identical ratings · meets it at Rock
- Symphonic prog identical ratings · meets it at Rock
Closest by the three ratings, among genres at least 4 steps away in the tree. A rating match is not a musical claim.